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108 Teaching and Learning in General Educationtheir courses. What you would expect, or at least hope, is that students wouldbegin their college physics course somewhere on the novice side of the scaleand that after completing the course they would have become more expertlikein their beliefs.What the data say is just the opposite. On average, students have morenovice-like beliefs after they have completed an introductory physics coursethan they had when they started; this was found for nearly every introductorycourse measured. More recently, my group started looking at beliefs aboutchemistry. If anything, the effect of taking an introductory college chemistrycourse is even worse than for taking physics.So we are faced with another puzzle about traditional science instruction.This instruction is explicitly built around teaching concepts and is beingprovided by instructors who, at least at the college level, are unquestionablyexperts in the subject. And yet their students are not learning concepts, andthey are acquiring novice beliefs about the subject. How can this be?Research on learning once again provides answers. Cognitive scientistshave spent a lot of time studying what constitutes expert competence in anydiscipline, and they have found a few basic components. The first is thatexperts have lots of factual knowledge about their subject, which is hardly asurprise. But in addition, experts have a mental organizational structure thatfacilitates the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge. Third,experts have an ability to monitor their own thinking (“metacognition”), atleast in their discipline of expertise. They are able to ask themselves, “Do Iunderstand this? How can I check my understanding?”A traditional science instructor concentrates on teaching factualknowledge, with the implicit assumption that expert-like ways of thinking